With the advent of computers and distributed computing environments, including the Internet, many businesses provide computer users access to online services offering a wide variety of information and services. For example, online services may provide stock quotes, new stories, magazine and journal articles from third-party information providers, and electronic mail (“e-mail”) services. Online services may also offer electronic commerce (“e-commerce”) with participating merchants to users. In order for users to access many of these online services, providers may require computer users to undergo a registration process in which users submit personal information such as their name, address, date of birth, occupation, etc. In exchange for submitting their personal information, users are given an account typically consisting of a user name and password which is then authenticated by the provider to allow access to World Wide Web “web” sites hosted by the online service provider.
As the number of online services has proliferated, some providers have begun offering single signon authentication in which a user can use a single account to gain access to a number of online services. An example of a single signon authentication service is the MICROSOFT®.NET PASSPORT service from the MICROSOFT CORPORATION of Redmond, Wash. A user registering with the authentication service receives an account which, after being authenticated by an authentication server, may then be used to login to a number of participating service providers. For example, a user wishing to login to the web site of a participating service provider (such as a merchant), is redirected to the authentication server for authentication. After the user logs in the authentication server by entering a user name and password, the user is then redirected to the web site along with an attached authentication ‘cookie.’ The web site uses the cookie to verify that the user is already authenticated. When the user navigates to another participating site in the same domain as the site which the use is already authenticated to, the user is again redirected to the authentication server which checks for the authentication cookie and redirects the user to the site without the user having to login a second time.
Despite the advantages of authentication services, however, there is often a need to authenticate accounts to utilize online service on a web server without user intervention. For example, new online services under development by online service providers undergo testing before they are accessible by the public. Currently, however, testing requires the creation of a number of test or dummy accounts for testers that use up resources on the authentication server and may interfere with users utilizing the ‘live’ authentication server for accessing existing services on the web server. Testers would also have to keep track of user names and password for each account as well as be aware of when the accounts are being used by other testers. The tests themselves also require that accounts on the web server be ‘clean’. That is, any data added to the web site by the account holder (such as created web pages) must be deleted so that failures can be easily reproduced. Currently, ‘cleaning’ requires brining the server down and reinstalling the server software resulting in users currently logged into the server being disconnected.
Therefore, in light of the above, there is a need for a method and system of authenticating accounts to utilize online services on a remote server without a username and password having to be known by a user. Moreover, there is a need for a method for cleaning accounts from the web server without disconnecting other users.
These and other features, advantages, and aspects of the present invention may be more clearly understood and appreciated from a review of the following detailed description of the disclosed embodiments and by references to the appended drawings and claims.